Announcing our largest release of Watson Developer Cloud services

The IBM Watson Developer Cloud has reached a major milestone in cognitive computing with new and expanded APIs and SDKs immediately accessible to all. The Watson platform is now the largest and most diverse set of cognitive APIs, technologies and tools available to developers for creating innovative applications or enhancing existing solutions.

Today we are announcing the release of new and enhanced Watson cognitive services across four areas: Language, Vision, Speech and Data Insights. These services use advanced artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning approaches to enable new opportunities to understand and engage users, and leverage the massive growth of unstructured data in multiple formats: text, speech, photos and videos.

Watson services break down the barriers to analyzing unstructured data with powerful cognitive capabilities available to all. With the release of these services, we are addressing needs expressed by individual developers, startups, and large enterprises. We have been guided by the feedback and usage patterns of our 77,000+ active developers, and over 350 partners (with 100 in market today) across 17 industries. They are moving forward on bold ideas made possible with Watson. ¬†

Introducing the new IBM Watson service releases and enhancements:

General Availability services Several services released in General Availability (GA) enable you to ‚Äúbring your own data,‚ÄĚ and train the service to address the unique needs of an industry, an enterprise, or even a startup pursuing a specialized use case. These are:

Natural Language Classifier mimics the human ability to classify naturally expressed short phrases into categories, or classes. By applying a deep learning approach, it can classify new phrases it has not been given before.Demo | Documentation

Retrieve and Rank combines the power of Apache Solr with machine learning algorithms to rerank results and deliver superior answers to queries. It is especially valuable for finding information buried in vast amounts of content.Demo | Documentation

Visual Insights enables drawing insights from large collections of images, such as those in social media. It infers attributes from the visuals related to interests, activities, hobbies, life events, and places to a more comprehensive view of what users are communicating.Demo | Documentation

Language Translation, Speech to Text and Text to Speech became Generally Available on July 6, 2015.

Concept Expansion released a new application as Limited Availability (access by request), allowing you to rapidly expand and enrich a concept set to boost the performance of your analytics. This cognitive application learns by example, taking the concept set you already know and learning from it to reveal additional, similar terminology that you may not have known existed.Demo | Documentation

We have also continued to enhance our many easy to use APIs out-of-the-box that are pre-trained on public data.

AlchemyAPI in Bluemix

All AlchemyAPI services are now available through Bluemix. This enables you to access more Watson API‚Äôs through Bluemix, take advantage of the benefits of building apps in the Bluemix platform and leverage Bluemix subscriptions for using AlchemyAPI services.

Combining Watson services, such as those shown below, enables you to build even more powerful cognitive applications.

Watson Developer Cloud is a self-service platform offering APIs that make it possible for any developer to leverage the power of artificial intelligence and deep machine learning capabilities across text, speech and image analytics.

With our latest releases, you are able to apply Watson cognitive capabilities across your own content and build powerful user engagement applications for a wide range of new opportunities. You can engage with more users in industry specific exchanges through more languages. And with our latest Concept Insights and Visual Insights services, you will be able to discover information hidden in unstructured text and images.

What will you build with Watson, now?

For questions about any of our new services and features, please use the Watson Forum. And we encourage you to share your feedback and comments below.

Over the next two weeks, follow our Watson Blogs for in depth Announcement blogs on each of the new or enhanced Watson services mentioned above.

IBM is placing the power of Watson in the hands of developers and an ecosystem of partners, entrepreneurs, tech enthusiasts and students with a growing platform of Watson services (APIs) to create an entirely new class of apps and businesses that make cognitive computing systems the new computing standard.

Manish,
Congratulations! on great and exciting launch of Watson’s most comprehensive and innovative capabilities. I am sure Watson will be the catalyst for many cognitive applications to bridge the gap between human and computers.